From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 13:47:06 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>Though I'm not sure it makes me happy (due to potential
>for colonizations for PVNs and subversion by amoral AIs)
>it looks like we will have ~1 TFLOP game consoles by 2005.
>
>See:
>Playstation 3 chip nears completion
>http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,,t275,00.html
>
>or Slashdot discussion:
>http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/06/1433253?mode=thread?tid=137
>
>The there are few details on the architecture available, it
>looks to be positioned between a Power PC architecture (2 CPUs)
>and the Blue Gene chips (probably many CPUs). Of course it
>is getting kind of hard at this point to differentiate between
>ALUs and CPUs (composed of a variety of ALUs).
>
>It looks like they are trying to make the "cells" in the
>Playstation 3 chips blur the distinction between ALUs and CPUs.
>
>Robert
>
>For the non-computer literate...
>TFLOP = Teraflop (10^12 instructions/sec)
>Human brain power is probably ~a petaflop (10^15 instructions/sec)
>CPU = central processing unit
>ALU = arithmetic logic unit
>PVN = private virtual network
>
>
>
Unfortunately, game consoles are optimized for portability, and are generally so designed that you must buy any software you want to run from the manufacturer. Perhaps they'll decide to allow this one to become more general purpos, but otherwise it's only a pointer along the lines of "This is what we can build now", rather than something that it's reasonable to adapt to another use.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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